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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2002-12-16 City Council (3)City of Palo Alto Manager’s Repor TO:HONOI~BLE CITY COUNCIL FROM:CITY MANAGER DEPARTMENT: UTILITIES DATE:DECEMBER 16, 2002 CMR:467:02 SUBJECT:ANNUAL PERFORNIANCE REPORT ON CUSTOMER SALES CONTRACTS This report is for information only. No action is required. DISCUSSION On July 17, 2000, the City Council approved reporting guidelines for electric and gas retail sales contracts (CMR 324:00). The guidelines were established to ensure that staff implemented proper oversight, review and approval, and performance reporting of retail sales contracts. This is the second annual performance report to the Council on customer sales contracts. During the reporting period for FY 2001/02, there were ten fixed-tem~ gas customer sales contracts and one long-term electric customer sales contract. Last month, when staff presented this report to the Utilities Advisory Conm~ission on November 6, 2002, there were four fixed-term gas sales contracts and no long-term electric sales contracts. Since then, a fifth customer has si~aed a fixed-term gas sales contract. RESOURCE IMPACT During FY 2001/02, staff initiated termination of a contract with a large customer in order to save the Electric Utility approximately $1.4 million in revenue over the remaining life of the 7-year contract. With regard to gas sales contracts, a net revenue savings of approximately $930,000 was realized during this perfornaance reporting period due to the cancellation of a relatively high priced wholesale gas contract and replacement with a lower priced wholesale contract. CMR:467:02 Page 1 of 2 ATTACItMENTS A:The UAC report "Perfol-mance Report on Customer Sales Contract" B:Minutes from UAC Meeting November 6, 2002 PREPARED BY: LI~CIE HIRMINA Utilities Pricing Manager DEPARTMENT HEAD: CITY MANAGER APPROVAL: J of Utilities EMILY HARRISON Assistant City Manager CMR:467:02 Page 2 of 2 TO: FROM: SUBJECT: AGENDA DATE: Utilities Advisory Commission Utilities Department Performance Report on Customer Sales Contracts November 6, 2002 REQUEST: This report is informational only. No action is required. ¯EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This report is intended to apprise the Coir~nission on the status of Utility customer sales comracts and insights learned. During the reporting period for FY01-02, there were ten fixed-term gas customer sales contracts and one long-term electric customer sales contract. Presently, there are four fixed-term gas customer sales contracts and no long-term electric customer sales contracts. BACKGROUND As part of the oversight function of the City of Palo Alto Utilities (CPAU) energy risk management program, Council approved electric and gas retail sales contract reporting guidelines (CMR 324:00). The guidelines were established to ensure that staff ilnplelnented proper oversight, review and approval, and performm~ce repotting of al! retail sales contracts. The guidelines state that, "Staff shall prepare performance reports on the economics of sales contracts. The performance reports will contain, at a minimum, an analysis of the cost recovery and revenue impact." This is the second annual performance report to the UAC and Council on customer sales contracts. DISCUSSION In response to deregulation, the City of Palo Alto Utilities (CPAU) began offering long-term electric sales contracts in 1997 to large commercial customers. Also, in 2001 CPAU introduced fixed-term COlmnodity gas rate contracts G-11 (one or two years) and G-12 (custom contracts could be for any term) to large conmaercial customers eligible for direct access. Such gas customers elect among three options: (1) forfeit their Direct Access option and elect service under CPAU’s Rate G-7 (standard full setwice rate), (2) retain their Direct Access option and receive service under either Rate G-3 (monthly price change) or sign up for a contract rate (G-11 or G-12), or (3) purchase their gas from an alternative supplier. To reduce exposure to risk, CPAU does not enter into fixed-price wholesale purchase contracts to cover the gas requirements of these customers until they made a selection and commitment. For FY 2001/2002, there were ten customers signed-up for a fixed-term rate (G- 11). For FY 2002-03, this number has been reduced to four. With lower gas market prices, most of the customers when their contracts expired have decided to receive gas service under CPAU’s Rate Schedule G-3. The commodity price on G- 3 is based upon the monthly market price. Performance of Long-term Electric Sales Contract In November 1997, CPAU signed a custom electric contract with one large customer. The term of the contract was seven years. However, to limit the exposure of risk to the City and the customer, either party with appropriate notification and payment of any applicable buyout provisions could terminate the contract. In July 2001, CPAU’s electric rates were increased 43 percent. As a result of this retail rate increase, the contract rate became and was projected to remain well below the applicable conm~ercial retail rate (E-7). Staff projected that if CPAU did not terminate this 7 year electric sales contract, CPAU would forego prospective revenues in excess of $1.363 million between July 2002 and November 2004. Because of the mag-nitude of the revenue savings, CPAU initiated termination of the contract with the customer in June 2002. At the time of termination, the customer had paid CPAU $14,053,760 under the contract since November 1997. If the customer had not entered into this contract and continued service under the standard Rate Schedule E-7, the customer would have paid CPAU $14,174,!58. The difference of $120,398 represents the revenue foregone under the contract to CPAU for that period. Based on the applicable buyout provision, the customer paid 90 percent of the difference between the contract charges and applicable rate charges or $108,358 as Table (1) shows. Table 1 Electric Customer Sales Contract Performance Customer Sales Contract over Period 11/97 to 6/02 Estimated Revenue if Customer Had Stayed on CPAU E-7 Rate Actual Contract Revenue Received Until Termination Difference Customer Buyout Provision Payment = 90% of Difference Savings to Customer over effective contract period Projected Revenue Savings to CPAU by Canceling Contract Sales Revenue ...... $14,174,158 14,053,760 120,398 $ 108,358 $ 12,040 $ 1,.~u_~,.~_~ Performance of Fixed-Tem~ Gas Rates The gas fixed-term rates (G-11, G-12) are full service commodity and distribution rates. However, only the gas cormnodity charge component of the rate is fixed. All other fees, administrative, distribution, local transportation charges, etc. can be changed by Council at any time. Fixed-term rates are structured to recover all commodity costs on a total class basis. The fixed term commodity charge is calculated on the forward wholesale market price at PG&E Citygate. To offer a uniform price for all qualifying customers, the fixed commodity charge is based on the load shape of the entire customer class. The charge also includes CPAU’s current supplier volumetric fee. Due to the fact that the retail commodity rates are hedged by buying gas to match the individual customer projected load shape for the term of the fixed-term rate, differences in the actual and projected individual load shapes result in over and under collecting on an individual customer basis. Therefore, a risk premium is included in the commodity rate to offset the differences in accordance with the Commodity Pricing Policy. Table 2 shows the FY 01-02 performance of the ten fixed-term gas customer contracts. The net conm~odity revenue figure of the ten contracts is $9~0,14_. This is the result of canceling high priced wholesale gas contracts. Table 2 FY01-02 Performance of Individual Fixed-Term Gas Contracts Customer Date Term Contract Executed June 13 24-mo Aug 0! B June 15 24-mo July 01 C June 29 24-mo Aug 01 D July20 12-too Aug 01 E July 20 12-too Aug 01 F July 20 12-mo Aug 01 G July 20 24-mo Aug 0 t H July 25 12-too Oct 01 I August 23 12-too Sept 01 J Sept 19 12-too Oct01 532,284 233,524 454,826 366,312 407,877 372,000 1,803,664 1,702,005 391,022 671,379 TOT’ S I~edwood Capaci~~ Expected Value Saving~ GRAND TOTAL Net Revenue/(Cost) Contract Actual Actuali Price cost Revenue ~ = = ($itlierm)i! $0.597 $196,224 $334,735 $0.573 $103,174 $138,025 $0.508 $164,472 $246,908 $0.499 $82,940 $113,710 $0.~99 $260,838 $377,081 $0.499 $118,494 $167,014 $0.491 $599,065 $835,776 $0.492 $582,685 $885,292 $0.441 $121,825 $176,453 $0.370 $i29,323 $163,805 2,359,046 $3,44’~,800 Net Revenue (cost), $138,511 $34,851 $82,436 $30,771 $116._4: $48,520 $236,712 $:0_.607 $54,628 $34,481 1,0~9,7’60 ($1~,617) $930,142 NEXT STEPS Staff will forward this contract performance report to Council in December 2002. UTILITIES STRATEGIC PLAN Offering customer sales contracts for fixed periods and prices supports the Utilities Strategic Plan objective to "Enhance customer satisfaction by delivering valued products and services." It also supports the Plan’s strategy to "Deliver products and services for competitive markets". ATTACHMENT: G- 11 Rate Schedule Prepared by:Lucie Hirmina, Utilities Pricing Manager Reviewed by:Girish Balachandran, Asst. Director, Resource Mgmt. Randy Baldschun, Assistant Director, Admin. Services Approved by:John Ulrich Director of Utilities ATTACHMENT B City of Palo Alto Utilities Advisory Commission NOVEMBER 6, 2002 MINUTES EXCERPT CUSTOMER SALES CONTRACTS UPDATE (FIXED-TERM GAS RATES) Carlson: Next item, the fixed term gas rate contracts. Baldschun: Excuse me, Chairman. Before we move to that, I just have to point out one tlsng in the Quarterly Report. Something that’s dear to my heart, and I have to We Girish and his staff credit. If you notice that.rate comparison of PG&E and Palo Alto gas rates, we’ve been higher than PG&E since May of 2001. If you look at the current month in October, and actually you don’t have November’s, but we’re about dead even with PG&E and winter’s coming and our rates are fixed. Guess where PG&E’s going to be going? We’re going to be looldng real good over the next 6 months. I’m pretty pleased about that. Carlson: Very good. Con~atulations. Dawes: As a follow-up, Randy, I was surprised that because of that spread, we didn’t lose more, have more people move into long-term contracts if they could drop out of the higher gas rate and lock into a lower one. It seemed like they could have saved a lot of money. Yet it went the other way. People were on long-term contracts, went out of them and went into the Palo Alto tariff. Baldschun: They’ll have this window. The window is usually between July and September each year. That’s when they have to make elections. They’re basing their decisions on whatever the market forecast is at that time, where are rates are in relationship to the market at that time. Of course, a year ago, as you can see by the chart, we were quite high. If you look at it now, we’re very competitive. They’re not jumping at the long-tem~ contracts now. They are jumping on G3. There are only a finite number of customers that actually qualify for contracts. It must be 10 or ! 5, Karla? Dailev: 11. Baldschun: So out of 23,000 gas customers, there are 11 that can actually qualify for these kinds of contracts. Dawes: And they can only make that election in the summer months? They can’t do it in the middle of the wintertime? Dailev: Actually, they can make the election at any time. There were 10 that si~aed up last year. Four of those si~aed up for 24-month contracts. Six were one-year contracts. All six of those expired some time between July and October of this year. One of those customers has si~aed up for a two-year this time, and there are two more of those customers who have started -- when winter comes close, gas becomes more to the forefront of some of the managers’ minds -- so two of the other customers have started conversations with customer reps about wanting to lock in. They’re starting to think about it finally. I wouldn’t be surprised that there weren’t more that took them. Dawes: I was just trying to understand why last winter when our rates were above marlcet that they didn’t say, "whoops, time to move into a market-based purchase?" We had just dropped our rates from really high to just sort of pretty high. Maybe they welcomed the reduction, but I’m still trying to understand the customer, why more didn’t switch at the time we had that spread over PG&E, which is more the market rate. Dailev: Right. You’re comparing the G7 rate to the PG&E’s rate? Because all of those - - well, 10 out of the 11 large customers -- had akeady switched to Gll. And once they had done that, once you take a fixed term rate, you have to stay on it until the end of your term, whether it be one year or two years. Baldschun: The G7 rate -- we didn’t have any customers on last year. They all switched to the fixed term contracts, or G3, because the rate was high. Dawes: The answer to nay question is, everybody did switch. Baldschun: They did switch. Did they switch to stay with Palo Alto as opposed with another supplier? My point was that there was this window which, once they siva a contract for 11 months, they can’t just get out of it on any given month. There’s a certain window when they have to make the decision. There are a couple things I just want to mention on this contract performance report. Right now, as I mention the report, we don’t have any customers on electric contracts. We’ve had 2 over the last 5 or 6 years. We just terminated one contract to save about $1.4 million to the utility over the life of the contract. On the gas side, as we’ve been talking about, we’ve got 10 customers that were on contracts last fiscal year. We terminated a contract with one of our suppliers because they were financially incapable, in our opinion, of delivering the gas. It so happens that when we replace that contract, the gas price in the supply contracts were quite a bit lower, so we ended up with $900-some thousand net revenue on the long term contracts, which goes basically into the Rate Stabilization Reserve Supply. Carlson: Are there any more questions on this long-term gas contract area? Go ahead George. Bechtel: Randy, I was wondering why in the Executive Smannary, thil~ing ahead to submitting this to the Council, that you didn’t make some conmaent about the results on financial results of these contracts. You state here very simply that some factual ilfformation that would useful to the Council. But it might be worthwhile to make some statements in the Executive Summary, right up front. Just what you just last said: that there’s $900 thousand net revenue went into the Rate Stabilization Reserve. That’s a very positive thing to say. It’s something that is a result and it’s good. It meant we did a good job at negotiating supply contracts. We did a good job at pricing it. You should put that right up in front of this report. Similarly, I guess, on the electric one as well -- that some sort of a financial result there would be useful. Otherwise, good job. Baldschun: Yes, your point’s well taken. Especially at the Council level where they typically just look at the bottom line. So that’s good advice. Carlson: Sure, go ahead. Dawes: A question on margins. I’m not sure ifFm comparing apples and oranges, but it looks as though the margin from Table 2 is about 31% of the $1,079,000 expected net revenue, which actually I get to be $1,089,000. I don’t quite understand if there’s arittnnetical mistake or not, versus the actual revenue, but then if you look at the budgeted gas on the retail side, it looks to be like a 54-55% marNn. Are these apples and oranges figures? Certainly I can understand why wholesale customers who are on these contracts would have a different profit mar~n than our retail customers, but I don’t M~ow if this distribution cost that are included or excluded or what, but I would like a con:unent on the margins that we get on these. Baldschun: Table 2 is strictly looking at the supply or commodity revenue and conm~odity cost. The way our contract policy is written is, basically, we want to break even on these tt~ngs. We don’t want to. lose. We don’t want to make money. We establish a risk premium to give us some kind of protection for various volume metric risks and other things. Our goal really is to break even. It so happens that we made 900- some thousand dollars as a result of getting a better contract in the market conditions. But that’s all on supply. It’s not distribution. Dawes: How does it compare to the adopted budget of FY ’02-’03 on the gas side that shows $108,000,000 operating matin on 3.3 of sales, retail sales -- like 55% mar~n? Baldschun: If you look at Page 4 of the Quarterly Report in Financial section, you’ll see a figure of $6.8 million that’s going into the Supply Reserve for the current fiscal year. That really includes, I believe, the $900 thousand plus other reduced supply costs that we experienced from other customers as a result of this renewed contract. I may be wrong, but Lucie can conect me. Dawes: Wow. It says the total revenue is $3.2 for retail sales and the contracts made up $2.4. Is that -- and so our non-contract sales are only $800 thousand? That doesn’t seem right to me. Baldschun: Our non-contract sales are more in the millions. $15, $20, $30 million? What’s our total? Bechtel: Dexter, you’re getting now into the fact that that is a monthly number on Gas Table on Page 3. Dawes: Oh., I’m sorry. I’m all off base. Bechtel: We’re back to those apples and oranges. Dawes: I’m all off base. Sorry about that. It’s versus $40 million, but the margq_n issue is still the same. We make $20 million margin in ’01-’02 on $40 million in revenues and it looks like on the gas we make roughly 30%. Baldschun: It’s quite a mar~n on those contracts. As I say, our intention is to have really no margha, but circumstances are favorable for us. Carlson: Go ahead, George. Bechtel: Randy, you said earlier though that you just want to break even on these contracts, but you just said we’re doing very well. We’re doing 30% margins. So what is our strategy? What is our goal here? Baldschun: When we set the prices for these contracts. We set the retail price based on floor prices for one or t~vo years depending on the individual contracts with the customers and at the time we set it, we went out and secured a corresponding purchase aDeement with another supplier at an off setting cost. Girish, do you want to? Balachandran: Let me just jump in over here. If what you’re talking about on the last report about the pretty large margin between the revenue and the cost, the cost doesn’t include some of the .... After we cancelledthe Enron contract -- let me step back. The revenue, when we charge the customer a certain contract price, it was based on market prices at that time and we did a lot of those contracts through Enron. We cancelled ErLron contract axed we are buying from the market now. We bought from Enron at these really high prices and these costs reflect our actual costs right now. It’s overstating, so the revenue over here, you can say it’s been overstated, because it doesn’t include the Era’on contract cost. Dawes: But just as a policy matter, we attempt to break even on the cormnodities on these ... Balachandran: Correct. Da~ves: ... and we target a 50% mar~n on all other contracts, on all other sales. Baldschun: Well, it’s not a target; it’s a result after the fact. When we si~ a contract with a customer, they a~ee to a certain price. That price is what you see on the revenue side. What Fin saying is -- if we had to pay more, let’s say the contract that we had received to supply that customer somehow went away and we had to replace it with a more expensive contract -- we would have eaten it. We wouldn’t have raised their price, because it’s a contract. Dawes: I understand. I’m talking about non-contract customers. I’m contrasting non- contract to contract customers and what our target mar~n policy is on that. Baldschun: On the commodity side, it’s break even. Dawes: For both? Baldschun: It’s break even, unless there’s a component to build the rate stabilization reserve. Sometimes we have to build up supply reserves, so we’ll bump up the rate a little bit. But there is no policy in terms of a specific magin. It’s basica!ly: pass through the cost. Sometimes we have to subsidize it -- because in the past, sometimes we’re taking money out of the Rate Stabilization Reserve to stabilize rates and sometimes we’re putting money into it. The intention is to break even, but you always have this flow into or out of the Rate Stabilization Reserve. Dawes: So it’s the distribution charges that covers all our administration costs and all our infiastructure costs and so on. Baldschun: And those just become the revenue requirement and that includes all of our fixed costs. Balachandran: I can add some more to that, if you want to get into gory details. It’s in the Quarterly Report. Karl has written up a number of pages here about risk premiums. The philosophy over there is break even, protecting the portfolio customers and to that extent, we add a risk premimn. You had requested that we come back to you several months ago, talking about how the risk premium was calculated. So in the Quarterly Report w,e do that. At the end of the year, we may see some additional revenues if certain risks don’t materialize. But we’ve essentially been quite conservative in establishing this risk premium. Dailev: Just to add one more thing. A risk premium N’eater than zero is a new thing. So all of the numbers you’re looking at in Randy’s report reflect rates that were established with a zero risk premium. Risk premimn does not contribute to the $900 thousand number that you see at the bottom of that table. Dawes: Thanks. Carlson: Okay. Any more questions on this? I’ve got one. understand these contracts. These are not take-or-pay contracts. Balachandran: The fixed-term rate contracts? I want to be sure I Carlson: Yes. Balachandran: Well, we don’t limit them to a certain quantity. Carlson: Correct. Balachandran: We just say, "It’s flip the switch. You can use whatever you want." That’s why we’ve added a risk premium for load variation. We’ve added a risk premium for the potential loss of business if they move out of the city and at that time if market prices are low, and we have to sell the gas we bought for them at a loss. We have a premium for that, and I believe there’s a third risk too. There are just two risks. Carlson: So that’s really this volmnetric risk, that we referred to. They’re not strict take- or-pay contracts, if business is lousy or it’s a warm winter or whatever. We’re really taking that risk. Balachandran: Right. Carlson: And that’s what we’re adjusting forin what you call the risk premium? Balachandran: Right. And we’ve done a probability analysis on that. We’ve been pretty conservative in what we compare other suppliers would have charged our customers to get a product just as flexible as what we’re offering. We use a number of criteria to come up with the appropriate risk premium axed one of the being competitiveness. That’s how we came up with the risk premium. Carlson: There are also some other risks here. Do we allow Direct Access for gas? I kaaow we don’t for electric, but we do for gas? Balachandran: Yes. Carlson: Because there’s a risk to the City if people come back in. This happened in the electric area to the State. A number of large energy consumers had contracts with companies that failed, so the consumers cane back to the standard rate, which was basically opened to all customers, which was below the spot market at that thne. The utilities in the state were forced to buy power at the spot rate for these new customers, which required those purchases and they were charged much lower. There’s a tremendous incentive to people to walk away. They were paying suppliers to walk away from contract. Suppliers were collapsing. Do we take into account that risk at all? Dailev: The way we have the rules set up, the risk is fairly small to us, because G7, which is the pool rate, the rate that we’re buying fixed price gas for over a 3-year plamaing horizon and all of that, once a customer takes that rate, they can’t leave it. Carlson: It’s the other way around that I’m concerned about, somebody that’s not on that rate. Balachandran: That’s a one-time risk in the sense that, yes, they may be able to come back, but once they’re there, they’re there. Carlson: Yes, once they’re there, they’re there, but they may, they have an option to come back when you don’t want them to come back. Balachandran: It’s a one-time option. It’s 25% of our load. It’s 10 customers and we’ve offered them some other rates over here. So the thning has to be perfect, because if they are on a fixed .term rate for !2 months or 24 months, they can’t do any switching regardless of where the market is or our bundled rate to other customers. They’re fixed on that rate. When their fixed term rate expires, the situation has to be that the market is high and our bundled rate is low, then they’ll switch over to GT. Baldschun: They forfeit their right to Direct Access after that. Carlson: They forfeit their Direct Access, but by coming back in at that point, they would force a broader rate increase, in effect. Balachandran: The thing that’s different from PG&E is PG&E has a monthly rate, so they can just keep coming back at any time. On the electric side, too, they basically paid their suppliers to get out of some contracts and come back to a fixed rate. For us, if they come back, it’s just a one-time entry and the window, there has to be a number of stars lined up perfectly for that to happen, and that’s a one-time risk for us. I guess the way to protect against that is maybe you set up certain rules which essentially prohibits them from coming back and, say, select one rate or the other. But we have things in place and that risk is pretty small. Carlson: You have to at least have some warning time that "if you have to drop off this rate, we have to have 90 days" -- or something -- so in case the stars do line up just wrong for us, that we’ve got some adjustment time. Balachandran: We can take a look at what the potential impact of such a case is -- and that’s kind of what we did. The first year of fixed term rates, we didn’t have a risk premiuna. We recognized the volmnetric risk, the risk of business default and we’ve added a risk premium. We’ll look at this again and the next go around of "contracts, which will probably be next year, we’ll analyze it and see if we want to add another risk prelnium. Carlson: Thm~k you very much.